Title
The Co-evolution of Speech and the Lexicon: The Interaction of Functional Pressures, Redundancy, and Category Variation.
Abstract
The sound system of a language must be able to support a perceptual contrast between different words in order to signal communicatively relevant meaning distinctions. In this paper, we use a simple agent-based exemplar model in which the evolution of sound-category systems is understood as a co-evolutionary process, where the range of variation within sound categories is constrained by functional pressure to keep different words perceptually distinct. We show that this model can reproduce several observed effects on the range of sound variation. We argue that phonological systems can be seen as finding a relative optimum of variation: Efficient communication is sustained while at the same time, hidden category variation provides pathways for future evolution.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1111/tops.12202
TOPICS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Cultural evolution,Co-evolution,Language,Phonetics,Communication,Redundancy,Robustness
Exemplar theory,Cognitive science,Computer science,Phonetics,Redundancy (engineering),Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Sociocultural evolution,Speech recognition,Lexicon,Speech perception,Perception,Semantics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
8.0
2.0
1756-8757
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.54
5
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bodo Winter1234.72
Andrew Wedel270.95